Conrad’s Typhoon – A Vivid Tale of Storm Survival at Sea

With collapsed buildings, fires, flooded subways, a beached ship, and scorched transformers throughout New York City, some residents are thinking there is no worse place to be on earth right about now, but that may not necessarily be true. In some cases, the worst place to ride out a hurricane is aboard a ship, but what does it feel like to do so?

While technological improvements in speed and engine reliability have made riding out a storm at sea marginally safer, no man-made invention have reduced the destructive force of giant waves crashing against steel ships. And no-one has captured the sheer agony and terror of witnessing a hurricane at sea like Joseph Conrad did in his classic novel Typhoon.

The following is an excerpt from the book which rings as true today as when it was published nearly 100 years ago:

It unveiled for a sinister, fluttering moment a ragged mass of clouds hanging low, the lurch of the long outlines of the ship, the black figures of men caught on the bridge, heads forward, as if petrified in the act of butting. The darkness palpitated down upon all this, and then the real thing came at last.

It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were—without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him…

The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her lurches had an appalling helplessness: she pitched as if taking a header into a void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time. When she rolled she fell on her side headlong, and she would be righted back by such a demolishing blow that Jukes felt her reeling as a clubbed man reels before he collapses. The gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire world were one black gully. At certain moments the air streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end. And then she would begin her tumbling again as if dropped back into a boiling cauldron. Jukes tried hard to compose his mind and judge things coolly.

The sea, flattened down in the heavier gusts, would uprise and overwhelm both ends of our ship (the Nan-Shan) in snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide, beyond both rails, into the night. And on this dazzling sheet, spread under the blackness of the clouds and emitting a bluish glow, Captain MacWhirr could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny specks black as ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the heads of the covered winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of his ship. Her middle structure, covered by the bridge which bore him, his mate, the closed wheelhouse where a man was steering shut up with the fear of being swept overboard together with the whole thing in one great crash—her middle structure was like a half-tide rock awash upon a coast. It was like an outlying rock with the water boiling up, streaming over, pouring off, beating round—like a rock in the surf to which shipwrecked people cling before they let go—only it rose, it sank, it rolled continuously, without respite and rest, like a rock that should have miraculously struck adrift from a coast and gone wallowing upon the sea.

The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens smashed—and two of the boats had gone already. They had gone unheard and unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock and smother of the wave. It was only later, when upon the white flash of another high sea hurling itself amidships, Jukes had a vision of two pairs of davits leaping black and empty out of the solid blackness, with one overhauled fall flying and an iron-bound block capering in the air, that he became aware of what had happened within about three yards of his back.

Click HERE to read the rest of this gripping tale of man vs the sea. And if you find yourself yearning for more high seas terror, or if are interested in a more modern tale, then check out the true story of the epic 1991 Nor’easter in Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea.

John Konrad

Captain John Konrad is co-founder of Unofficial Networks, Editor In Chief of gCaptain, and author of the book Fire On The Horizon. He is a USCG licensed Master of Unlimited Tonnage and, since graduating from SUNY Maritime College, has sailed a variety of ships from ports around the world.